All hail the skills of the grey heron

A Johnny-the-bogs regularly stands sentinel at the end of an old pier, Tanner’s Pier, now reduced to a corridor of wrack-grown rocks opposite what was once the Earl of Shannon’s summer house, now the elegant Courtmacsherry Hotel.

On summer disco nights, powerful strobes from the hotel, roam the skies over the bay like the anti-aircraft beams that searched the night skies over London for German bombers during the Blitz.

The tall bird, more widely known as a grey heron, stands 300 yards away at the pier end, shoulders hunched and silhouetted against the gleaming water. Sometimes, it takes flight, and flaps on its capacious wings to the bottom of the slipway across the street from the Anchor Bar. There, within earshot of the music from the Anchor on Saturday nights, it fishes by street light, the clever bird.

I say clever, because it has learned that fish are attracted to the light but, even cleverer, is its understanding of refraction, how water distorts the position of submerged objects, so that they appear to be where they are not. What is more, the fish are moving. Yet, it can hunt successfully even when the surface is as slicked as a mirror in the light, riffled by a breeze or broken into wavelets, stippled with raindrops or so thick with sand that it seems a miracle that the bird can detect any movement at all. Nevertheless, with unerring accuracy, it snatches anything from a slippery eel to a half-pound mullet, tossing its head back the better to let it slip down.

It is no wonder that nothing attracts a heron as much as a well-stocked garden pond where finding one’s breakfast, dinner and tea is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. In fact, in the final strike the beak moves as fast as a harpoon from a gun. It doesn’t spear the fish, but snatches it.

However, ornamental fish ponds are rare in rural Ireland, so things are not always that easy for the heron. It has to live by stealth and expertise and the adult grey heron is a master of both. Patience is of the essence, coupled with perseverance because, in natural surroundings, many attempts may fail. Fish are smart, too.

The bird moves along the shallow edges of the water. It treads delicately, the water sometimes no higher than its toes. It finds a spot where it overlooks the surface: the sun, or the street light, will not be behind it, casting its shadow. It then stands absolutely motionless, and waits.

When the prey arrives, it lowers its head and neck, slowly and smoothly, crouching until the dagger beak is near the target prey. Older birds sometimes move their heads from side to side, the better to calculate the degree of refraction and the distance. Then, zap! As poet Ted Hughes wrote of thrushes hunting on a lawn:

No sighs or head scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab/ And a ravening second ...

It is satisfying to watch a heron fish. If one can sit motionless and watch, matching one’s patience with theirs, the hunt has all the elements of a drama. A miss, a shake of the head; it straightens again and resumes its statue-stillness. Another stab; this time, an eel lifted high and wriggling desperately as it disappears down the gullet. Good-bye, eel.

The recently arrived Little Egrets have, in the last 10 years, moved into traditional heron ‘rookeries’, as they are called. Although more numerous, they do not appear to be in competition with their larger cousins – the herons, being taller – can fish in deeper water for a start. The pure white Johnny-come-latelys are beautiful, as are the two spoonbills that have spent most of the winter on the bay, but it is old Johnny-the-bogs that reigns supreme.